Video games are a popular form of entertainment. Multi-player games, where two or more individuals play simultaneously in a common simulated environment, are becoming increasingly common, especially as more users are able to interact with one another using networks such as the World Wide Web (WWW), which is also referred to as the Internet. Implementing video games in a networked environment poses several challenges.
In particular, video games, especially those offering high-quality graphics, may produce data streams having a maximum data rate that is a significant fraction of an available data rate communications capacity in a network. The data rate may also vary significantly as a function of time depending on how often a game state for a respective game is modified or updated. This combination of high data rates and time-varying data rates may make cost effective and efficient resource allocation in a networked environment, such as a satellite system, a cable television system or the Internet, challenging. Video-game systems in such network environments may need additional margin, in the form of additional bandwidth overhead as well as hardware and software redundancy, to ensure that performance is not degraded. These systems challenges are compound for multi-player games.
Encoding of the data streams in a video-game system using an existing encoding approach, such as one of the compression standards developed by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG), may only offer, at best, a partial solution to these problems and may also pose additional challenges. For example, MPEG2 is a flexible compression standard that takes advantage of the fact that much of the content in digital video (up to 95%) may be redundant information. Encoding of these portions of the content may significantly reduce the corresponding data rate. Other portions of the content, however, may be much less redundant. In conventional MPEG2 encoding, this may result in higher data rates for more complex images. As a consequence, MPEG2 encoded data streams may still have a data rate that varies significantly as a function of time. In addition, real-time or on-the-fly encoding of multiple data streams using an existing encoding approach, such as MPEG2, may increase the complexity, cost and/or power consumption of the video-game system.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved system for implementing video games in networked environments.